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Nancy Pelosi: ‘I Fully Expect to Be Speaker After Midterm Elections’

When Nancy Pelosi sat down for her keynote address at Women@NBCU’s annual Power of the Purse Breakfast this morning at Cipriani’s in New York, host Jeff Zucker wasted no time getting her take on the state of politics this year. Specifically, the outgoing NBC Universal CEO and president asked if Pelosi herself would still be in office in five weeks.

“I fully expect to be Speaker in five weeks,” she said. “I have big confidence in my candidates. They’re excellent; they’re battle-tested. They know what they believe, and they’re doing just fine in their districts.”

Pelosi said the biggest lesson she’s learned since taking office is that women have to seize their own power.

“Women were not going to wait another 200 years to take power in Congress,” she said. “When I first ran for leadership, the men [in Washington] said, ‘Who said she could run?’ Their attitude towards reaching women was ‘let’s find out the things women want, and then we’ll do [those things].'”

Pelosi explained that she initially entered politics because she “saw it as an extension of being a mother.” She also championed President Obama’s health care reform strategy, saying that women and families would be the primary beneficiaries. “No longer will being a woman be a pre-existing condition,” she said.